Nick Breen

Tag Archives: programming

I jump into code too quickly. I don’t think about the whole system, I just dive right in. I’ve made this mistake 5 times this year and every time I remind myself to slow down. I’m paraphrasing my old boss Bong Doh: “Don’t touch the keyboard until you know exactly what, where, and why. What the problem is, where you are adding code, and why this code will fix the problem.” When I don’t follow this rule, I pay with my time and frustration. As we all know, rushing leads to bugs, bugs lead to anger, and anger leads to the dark side.

Here are 4 more lessons I’ve had the pleasure of learning:

Confirm all program touch points are functional before jumping into code.

Example 1: Our signup emails weren’t sending and I thought our code was the problem. After spending an hour investigating the ‘problem code’, I learned that live.com marked our account as a spam account and blocked us from sending emails (Mailchimp & Mandrill are great alternatives to getting spam blocked).Example 2: Our videos weren’t streaming, and again, I dived into the code thinking it was a problem with the player. It turns out Microsoft Azure has problems streaming older .mp4 codecs, re-encoding the test video solved the problem!

Understand what the code does before diving in.

Example 1: I created a WordPress site and was editing CSS files to style the font and change some colours. I learned hours later, WordPress layouts have editors to easily change any kind of style and much more!

Prioritize features and understand how important each feature is to the project. If a priority 1 feature is taking 20% of your overall time-budget, it may not be worth it.

Sometimes a good enough solution is good enough! Don’t let perfect get in the way of good. On the other side of the coin, a quick-fix stays much longer than you’d like.

Example 1: During a Startup Weekend blitz, I was in charge of building our prototype. I invested too much time perfecting the prototype. The prototype was only 1/4 of the business, and I should have spent more time developing our pitch and slide deck.